Authorship of scientific publications is a means of recognizing both a researcher’s contribution to a paper as well as their responsibility for the integrity of their work. Various approaches to author order may be used to rank individuals and convey the extent of their contribution. For example, authors may be listed by decreasing level of contribution, whereby most credit and responsibility are allocated to the first authors (common in the health sciences), or they may be named in alphabetical order, giving equal recognition to all (common in the social sciences). There are also “rules of thumb” or preferred practices that exist in the respective disciplines or research fields (e.g., corresponding author first, Principal Investigator last). In the case of multidisciplinary health research, differing norms and practices regarding authorship distribution may be held by the respective team members; and, this can give rise to disagreement and even conflict within research teams. Although researchers and scholarly organizations agree that authorship should be distributed “fairly”, a shared understanding or consensus as to what constitutes fairness, as well as its practical implementation in multidisciplinary research collaborations, remains a significant challenge.
This thesis proposes a conceptual ethical framework for the fair distribution of authorship in multidisciplinary health sciences research. At the outset, the various methods recommended by journals, learned societies, as well as in the academic literature to distribute authorship are critically reviewed; issues that may impede or complicate fair authorship distribution in multidisciplinary research are highlighted; these include, for example, power differentials, conflicts of interests, and conflicting disciplinary norms and cultures. The analysis will show that current universal normative authorship guidelines are overly broad, and therefore, are insufficient to effectively resolve many of the diverse issues that are often specific to differing contexts of research. As will be discussed, the limitations of such guidelines are particularly significant in the case of global health collaborations that involve researchers from low and middle income countries and those from high income countries. A theoretical approach influenced by T.M. Scanlon’s Contractualism is proposed as a means of achieving the flexibility needed for the diversity of multidisciplinary research contexts; mutual agreement and reasonability are used to determine whether ethical principles are “fair”. Four central and interconnected principles – desert, just recognition, transparency and collegiality – are presented as the conceptual foundation to support the development of a process for the fair distribution of authorship. This authorship distribution process integrates the detailed research tasks commonly used in “contributorship” taxonomies to delineate individual duties and roles in the research project and subsequent publication. Contributions are then compared and valued more efficiently to determine authorship order while promoting fairness in multidisciplinary health sciences research.